houses, but by degrees as the number of these workmen increased and as a knowledge of their handicraft spread to native Romans, Minerva became so prominent that the state was compelled to acknowledge her, and to accept her among the gods of the state.  But it was a very different acknowledgment from that of Hercules or Castor; these gods had been received inside the pomerium, but Minerva was given a temple outside, over on the Aventine.  None the less her cult throve, and her power was soon shown both religiously and socially.  Her great festival was on the 19th of March, a day which had been originally sacred to Mars, but the presence of Minerva’s celebrations on that day soon caused the associations with Mars to be almost entirely forgotten.  Socially her temple became the meeting-place of all the artisans of Rome, it was at once their religious centre and their business headquarters.  There they met in their primitive guilds (collegia) and arranged their affairs, and thus it continued to be as long as pagan Rome lasted.  The respect shown to these guilds of Minerva is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in an incident which happened in the time of the Second Punic War, several centuries after the introduction of the cult.  Terrified by adverse portents the Roman Senate instructed the old poet Livius Andronicus to write a hymn in honour of Juno and to train a chorus of youths and maidens to sing it.  The hymn was sung, and was such a great success that the gratitude of the Senate took the form of granting permission to the poets of the city to have a guild of their own, and a meeting-place along with the older guilds in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine.  This was the Roman state’s first expression of literary appreciation; from her standpoint it was flattery indeed, for were not poets by this decree made equal to butchers, bakers, and cloth-makers, and was not poetry acknowledged to be of some practical use and adjudged a legitimate occupation?

The history of the cult of Minerva is much more complicated than that of Hercules or Castor.  Like them she was subjected to strong Greek influence, and, as we shall see later, not very long after her introduction she was taken into the company of Juppiter and Juno, thus forming the famous Capitoline triad.  Also temples were built to her individually under various aspects of the worship of Athena with whom she gradually became identified, but in the old Aventine temple the original idea of Minerva, the working man’s friend, continued practically unchanged.  Doubtless the society of Servius’s day, who witnessed the coming of Minerva, did not realise what this introduction meant, and how absolutely necessary it was for Rome’s future development that the artisan class should be among her people, and that this class should be represented in the world of the gods.  They little knew that in the temple on the Aventine was being brought to expression the trade-union idea, which was to pass over into the mediaeval guild of both workmen and masters, still under religious auspices, and to find a latter-day parody in the modern labour-union, with its spirit of hostility to employers, and its indifference, at least as an organisation, to things religious.